More than 6,000 artifacts recovered in a large police operation in Europe

The operation, dubbed “Pandora VIII”, was conducted at transit points, border crossings, museums, private homes and online.

Ancient coins, amphorae and paintings are among the approximately 6,400 art objects found during an annual operation supported by Interpol and Europol in some twenty European countries, Interpol announced on Friday, July 19. Eighty-five people were also arrested, the International Criminal Police Organization said.

The operation consisted of “several thousand checks“in airports, ports, border crossing points, auction houses, museums and private residences, but also on the Internet, explains Interpol in a press release (link in English).

The countries that participated in Operation Pandora VIII are Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Serbia, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

They were stolen in Ukraine and illegally transported to Spain. In the Czech Republic, police intercepted a statue of St. Bartholomew, dating from the mid-17th century, a “national cultural artifact” stolen in 1994 from a chapel in Rimov.

The Spanish authorities, in collaboration with their Ukrainian colleagues, have thus got their hands on eleven gold objects whose value is estimated at 60 million euros, in a trafficking of archaeological pieces from the Scythian culture.

The French authorities seized an illegally exported painting by Vietnamese artist Mai-Thu, valued at nearly 170,000 euros.